


How To Talk To Your Son

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 22:22:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9627884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: Don’t think about him as much as you used to. Recall less and less the way his tiny fingers seemed curved in a perpetual half-fist, ready to close around anything that came into his path.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Both the title and the format of this story were inspired by "How To Talk To Your Mother (Notes)" by Lorrie Moore.

_2016._ Look in his eyes for the first time in nearly fifteen years. He doesn’t look the way you thought he would. More like Mulder than you anticipated, which is startling. He also looks a little like the dumpy woman fluttering about the porch, still in disbelief that a government helicopter just landed on her front lawn. He looks like her in way that old married couples are indistinguishable from each other, in the way that dogs start to look like their owners. Or is it the owners who start to look like the dogs? 

“William?” you ask, even though you know. 

“Yeah?” His voice hasn’t dropped yet. 

“I’m Agent Scully, I’m going to need you to come with us.”

He looks to the woman on the porch, her colorless brown hair coming loose from its braid. “What is this about?” he asks.

“There’s not much time to explain,” you say, “but there’s a man in this helicopter who’s very sick and we think you might have a certain… element in your genetic makeup that can help him.”

His blue eyes flash--at least those are yours--as he tries to process. Then he says, “Okay.” Just like that, he believes you, and finally you think you understand how Mulder feels, after all these years.

 

_2015._ “Just think about it,” Walter says, and you do. You really do. 

You have forgotten what it would be like to come home not smelling faintly of antiseptic and bile every day. You and Mulder are friendly. It wouldn’t be terrible to work with him again. 

 

_2014._ Don’t think about him as much as you used to. Recall less and less the way his tiny fingers seemed curved in a perpetual half-fist, ready to close around anything that came into his path. 

You can’t remember anymore whose father you named him after. Yours, Mulder’s, or your son’s own. Well, you could hardly name him Fox. I mean, really.

 

_2013._ Do not answer the phone when Mulder calls. Talk to your mother every day, like some sad woman in a book you read once. Silently assess the measure of her. She’s survived everything you have, but she had to watch it happen to her daughter. It’s worse, somehow, to see your suffering through your mother’s eyes. Guiltily, remember how long you waited to tell her about the cancer. 

“I thought it would just go away,” you say one night on the phone in your new apartment, your mother an arm’s length away in Bethesda. “That if I didn’t tell you it wouldn’t be real.” Don’t tell her how you pictured it shriveling up like a grape and becoming a raisin and one day sneezing it out into a tissue, curling your lip at the dark mass in your mucus, and then tossing it into the trash. 

“Dana, dear, you’re a doctor. You know that’s not how it works.”

She is the only person who calls you Dana anymore. You asked everyone at work to call you by your last name years ago. Tell them you’re used to it. They comply, except for one intern who calls you “Doctor D.” For some reason, it doesn’t bother you. 

Huff: “I know that’s not how it works, Mom.” 

She suggests, not for the first time, that you get a cat. You try to laugh it off even though the thought grips you with a cold hand and makes your stomach roil. To get a cat would be admitting defeat and you are not there yet. Quickly think of a reason you have to go and wish her good night with a smile in your voice. 

Answer the phone without looking two minutes later when it rings again, assuming it’s her. Start to apologize for your quick sign off. Realize it’s Mulder. Grip the phone with both hands like you used to when a phone was big enough to hold with two hands. Listen to each other breathing for a while. 

Say his name, _Mulder,_ like an invocation. When you worked together you learned that many demons can be summoned by the mere utterance of their name at a certain time of day under specific conditions. Allegedly. Feel as if you are summoning him now. Say it’s nice to hear his voice, because it is. 

Meet up for coffee two days later and enjoy yourself.

 

_2012._ Leave. Take his picture, nothing else. 

 

_2011._ Feel as if the world is coming to an end when the internet connection goes out one night at the house. Mulder hems and haws, fiddling with the router. He’s emerged from his study. He can’t hole up and scour the deep web without an internet connection, of course. 

Say: “It’ll probably be back in an hour or so. You know reception is spotty up here.” 

Lounge on the couch with a book for the first time in ages. Notice the swell of your breasts beneath your tanktop and feel incredibly sexual all of a sudden. Stand and take off all your clothes, chilly in the breeze from the open window. Feel like a different person, the kind of woman with a name like Jacquelyn or Isobel with an _o_. Go to the front room, where the router is. Pose behind him in the doorway and say something ridiculous like, “Why don’t you quit working on that and come to work on me.”

He looks up and says, “Come on, Scully, quit messing around and help me with this.”

Wipe your eyes with the backs of your hands and put your clothes back on. Announce you are going back to the hospital, there is something you forgot to do and it’s got to get done before morning. 

Stay there for three or four days until you spill coffee on both your extra sets of scrubs and can’t justify going out to buy new ones. Say you’re sorry and almost mean it when Mulder clutches you and says he was so worried. 

Then why didn’t you call me? Don’t say that. 

 

_2010._ Go to a support group for parents who no longer have children. That’s how they word it, a carefully constructed aphorism because no one wants to say they’re dead. No one wants to talk about tiny faces caked in pallid makeup, every indentation on their lips outlined, little boys buried in their boy scout uniforms, girls in their first communion dresses. 

You and Mulder worked a case once--somewhere in the midwest--where a series of graves were upturned and their clothes stolen. Men, women, and children thrown haphazardly back into their padded box-beds in various states of decomposition. Local law enforcement had found a ripped piece of a communion veil on a tree. You touched it without gloves on because you needed to know what it felt like. Soft, impossibly soft, more precious than the top of his head with his swirl of dark hair like his father’s. 

Dana, would you like to share today, the group leader asks. You say no thank you and get yourself another cup of coffee. You are jittery on the drive home. When you pull up in the driveway, all the lights are turned out. In the living room, pick up a pillow and scream into it until it feels like your throat bleeds. 

 

_2008._ After the snowiest winter you can remember (although your memory’s not so good these days), go somewhere warm. Bermuda. Puerto Rico. Belize. Hawaii. The week before, stand in dressing rooms at the mall and tilt your head at your reflection in the mirror. Is that you? Is that what you look like? She’s not so bad, you suppose. Turn profile and admire the curve of your ass. Push your breasts together, then apart. 

Decide you have aged well. Buy a long, flowing coverup. “Forget” to pack it.

 

_2006._ You begin to write him letters, advice for primary school and how to talk to kids who seem mean. How to do taxes and establish a line of credit. The lyrics to a Dionne Warwick song. You never send them. They live in a box in the guest room. You paint it a bearable sort of green and during a fight you accidentally refer to it as “William’s room.” Mulder just sort of stares at you, stunned. 

 

_2005._ Buy a house. Pay in cash. Pick out furniture at Pottery Barn and Pier One. Think that things are finally looking up. Knock on wood. Lay between sheets you finally own again and think blissfully, I could get used to this.

You do not. 

 

_2004._ Toast miserably to nothing on election night. 

“Four more years,” Mulder intones sarcastically. 

Snap at him, “What do you have to be miserable about? You can’t even vote.”

 

_2003._ On his second birthday, stare at a stain on the hotel wall while Mulder takes you from behind, his hands like vice grips on your waist. Let him finish quickly and sloppily kiss your shoulder and then go to the bathroom to clean up. Think about finishing yourself off. Slide your hand between your legs and realize you don’t feel like you used to. For years you were the only one who knew yourself, but it’s different now. 

 

_2001._ Split in two with the weight of him, the size. When Monica wipes the sweat from your brow and tells you you’re doing great, you’re doing wonderfully, Dana, joke: he has broad shoulders like his father. Do not scream where the hell is Mulder, even though you want to. Breathe the way you’ve been taught, the way they do in movies and the way you did on a yoga mat in that studio above an Indian restaurant on K Street, imagining this moment in a hospital bed and not some shantytown near the thirty-third parallel. 

Wonder why John has that terrible accent if he was born here, where they drawl their r’s and their e’s sound like i’s. Try to scream. The pain is a bubble in your throat and you want to bite something, want to push your shoulders back and together until your arms snap off and you dissolve into stardust. But you don’t, and neither does he, all eight pounds nine ounces of him, wailing into the darkness in late spring. 

He is perfect. 

 

_2000._ Feel him growing inside of you. He is the size of banana, your obstetrician tells you. Hate how people always liken fetuses to fruit. Why not little animals or the shipping boxes at the post office? Your baby would fit in a standard large overnight envelope, the kind with the accordion sides. You’ll take it? Lovely. And how will you be paying today?

 

_1997._ Nod somberly at the diagnosis and wonder how to tell your mother that you won’t be giving her any grandchildren.


End file.
